Adolescents’ Expression of Gratitude and How their Parents Encourage it

• In Event: 1-178 - Focusing on Family Strengths: Understanding Positive Development in a Family Context

Integrative Statement

Examining the development of gratitude in adolescents builds the knowledge necessary to understand how best to promote its development. Gratitude occurs when a beneficiary receives a benefit from a benefactor and freely wishes to repay with something that takes into account the benefactor’s wishes (McConnell, 1993). Gratitude has the unique power to strengthen bonds between individuals when a beneficiary recognizes and responds positively to a benefactor’s voluntary kind action by reciprocating in some way that has value for the benefactor (Tudge, Freitas, & O’Brien, 2015). Although gratitude is expressed by children of all ages, differences likely exist in its expression depending on the age or the stage of development of the child (Mendonça et al., 2018). Importantly, parents play a key role in the socialization and encouragement of gratitude in their children (Hussong et al., 2017).

We propose that ontogenetic development may play an important role in gratitude development because the beneficiary must be able to take the benefactor’s perspective into account in order to experience gratitude as we define it. Therefore, we hypothesize that older children will use a more sophisticated expression of gratitude than younger children. To explore this, we collected data in both elementary and middle schools using short open-ended questionnaires.

We compared variations in age in gratitude expressions; verbal (e.g., “thank you”); (b) concrete (reciprocation with things important to beneficiaries); and (c) connective (taking the benefactor’s wishes into account when repaying) (Tudge et al., 2015). Using data from 730 7- to 14-year-olds (21% African-American, 37% European American, 18% Hispanic, 24% Other; Mage = 10.52) from NC, we used logistic regression to examine whether ethnicity and/or age was significantly associated with youth expression of different types of gratitude.

We found that age, but not ethnicity, was significantly associated with the type of gratitude youth expressed (see Table 1). With each additional year, youth were significantly more likely to express verbal gratitude (B = .125, eB = 1.134, p < .01) and connective gratitude (B = .163, eB = 1.177, p < .001). In contrast, with each additional year, youth were significantly less likely to express concrete gratitude (B = -.187, eB = .830, p < .001) than were older children.

In order to understand how parents may influence the development of gratitude in adolescents, some parents who indicated willingness on the parent permission letter participated in parent interviews. Thematic analysis was used to analyze interviews to search for themes and patterns that could provide insight (Glesne, 2016). For example, the majority of parents felt it was natural that youth did not always express gratitude as they would have expected because youth need to be taught about gratitude. One of the ways that parents fostered gratitude was to use downward social comparison to highlight the need to feel grateful. Another of the methods discovered to encourage gratitude was for parents to speak to their children about gratitude when youth failed to express it at appropriate times. Additional methods and parents’ gratitude strategies based on adolescent age are discussed.

Authors

• Sara Etz Mendonça, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Presenting Author

• Ebony D. Leon, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jonathan Tudge, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author